Candidates' Perceptions of Voters' Preferences in Australia

Do politicians systematically misperceive the preferences of their voters? This potential source for the widely debated crisis of representation has so far been understudied despite its increasing relevance in times of populist parties’ and leaders’ rise. Together with Thomassen (2012) and previous authors we argue that congruence between parties and political elites needs to be measured on specific policy issues rather than on an abstract, encompassing left-right dimension. To address both of these issues we rely on a novel combination of data for the case of Australia: on the one hand candidates’ own responses and the official party answers to a number of policy statements contained in the smartvote Australia Voting Advice Application but also their perception of where their (party and constituency) electorate stands on the same issues, and on the other the actual position of these voters as recorded by the post-electoral Australian Electoral Survey.